The Northern California Chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt; the Department of Near Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley; and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley, are sponsoring the following lecture:

Daring the Western Desert: Ancient Travelers and Their Rock Inscriptions

Since 2001 the North Kharga Oasis-Darb Ain Amur Survey team has been exploring the sandy routes connecting Kharga oasis to Dakhla and beyond. In the course of this survey we have discovered and recorded numerous lonely rock sites which were used in antiquity as camping spots and stopovers for travelers. The rich epigraphic material from these sites provides us with valuable information about the uses of these desert routes, traveling practices, as well as the identity and background of the ancient travelers who chose to carve their marks on these rocks. In this lecture I will discuss some of these Egyptian rock graffiti, focusing on their connection to ancient Egypt's historical narrative and their appropriation of Egyptian formal writing conventions.

About the Speaker

Dr. Nikolaos Lazaridis is the Associate Professor of Ancient Mediterranean History at California State University, Sacramento. He is one of the very few Greek Egyptologists. He left Greece in 1996 to study Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and Oxford University, and later became a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies at Radboud University of Nijmegen, Netherlands.

His doctoral dissertation, Wisdom in loose form: The language of proverbs in Egyptian and Greek collections of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, was published by Brill Publishers in 2007. In addition, Dr. Lazaridis has authored numerous articles on ancient Egyptian literature, epigraphy, and religion. He is currently preparing two monographs: Let me have Your Majesty hear a marvel: Aspects of narrative writing in ancient Egypt, and North Kharga Oasis Survey, vol. 2: The Darb Ayn Amur, co-authored with Dr. Salima Ikram and Dr. Leslie-Anne Warden Anderson.

In 2003, while still a doctoral student at Oxford, he joined the North Kharga Oasis Survey team, headed by Salima Ikram and Corinna Rossi, and since 2007 he has become the teams chief epigrapher. Last year Dr. Lazaridis was one of the recipients of the prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities award for Scholarly Editions and Translations. This year he received Sacramento State University's award for research, scholarship, and creative activity.